- A Time to Scatter Stones. Real world with magic where magic is a finite resource; magicians mainly concern themselves with reading each other's minds and assassinating one another to gain control over each other's magical artifacts. Normal people have witnessed and remembered magic but not frequently enough to think anything of it. Anyone can become a magician, but unless they begin in childhood cannot become a powerful one. In fact, magical abilities tend to peak in adolescence. All magicians are highly specialized, partly naturally, partly by choice. Dark comedy satirizing magical fantasy in general (e.g. families contrive impossibly complex languages for internal communication that they use to control their magical artifacts, not because magic requires weird languages, but because they don't want anyone else to be able to use their artifacts against them).
- Ex Post Facto. Developing new technology is pretty much illegal because experiments in AI caused stock market crashes and other developments aided terrorist activity through things like bitcoin. The internet, and computers are so important to life as we know it, that they cannot be forbidden or cracked down upon. However, the government seeks to ensure that all platforms are very closed, and writing code without specific permits to write exactly the code the government inspects and deems harmless is quite illegal. The government also arrests and imprisons quite a few people who were involved in developing the open source software that lead to some of the major problems, even though their activity wasn't illegal at the time, while in prison they form alliances with gangs and other organized crime that gradually grows into a major chaotic force.
- Fantasy world with approximate technological development of ancient Greece. Ordinarily humans don't have any supernatural abilities, but gods and demons are real. Some of the gods are blood-thirsty and demand human sacrifice and other forms of violence, so do some of the demons - the moral character of the supernatural being has no bearing on whether they are gods or demons. However, all societies pretty much agree on which supernatural beings are gods and which ones are demons, and making ties with the beings considered demons is considered "evil" whereas serving the gods is not. The only noteworthy difference between gods and demons is that demons negotiate with humans and allow certain humans to channel their power; whereas, the gods simply dictate their will to humans and have mercy on whom they will have mercy and deal harshly with whom they will deal harshly. Gods sometimes fall and become demons, and demons sometimes rise to godhood. People only turn to the demons in desperation, and the demons are often willing to help, for a price. In exchange for renouncing the demons, the gods often free people who have gained power through their deals with the demons from the contracts they have signed. The story is told through the human perspective, but humans are pretty much pawns in the overall story. The backdrop of gods and demons negotiating for increased power in their own political system that somehow depends on the prayers and sacrifices of people is what really dictates the movements in history in this world.
- A world where physics and chemistry abide by the same laws as they do in our world. It has three sapient species, two of which are related and vaguely hominid. They have skeletons, and warm squishy bodies, and give birth to live young, and are capable of regarding each other as pretty much equally "human." The third sapient species is entirely other. It's more like an arachnid. It has an exoskeleton and twelve limbs. It communicates through clicking/dancing patterns that it makes with its feet that are completely incomprehensible to the other species -- both of which are pretty much incapable of learning each other's languages to something approximating fluency, but are able to learn them well enough to communicate certain ideas. The arachnid creatures are too incomprehensibly other to trigger normal moral considerations at least when I think about them. When would be a good-evil axis for behaviors with similar impact done by other hominid creatures falls on a curiosity-horror axis for these creatures instead. When hominids seek to eradicate them, it doesn't seem evil or horrible; it simply seems natural. When their bites paralyze hominid creatures with extremely painful neurotoxins and they drag the hominids back to their nests to spend a few days of agony being occasionally re-paralyzed by the excruciating bites until a new brood of young hatch at eat them alive, it provokes horror but not moral outrage. In fact, the concept of pain seems to be incomprehensible to the arachnid creatures -- though their behavior upon returning to a destroyed nest demonstrates that they have some concept of loss and possibly-emotions that are full of sensations that say something not-good has happened. I try to imagine the world from both hominid species' perspectives, and try to make both species human enough that their own perspective of themselves seems human, but non-human enough that their own perspective of each other paints the other species as very sub-human, in a way that makes them seem sub-human to human readers. For example, they are mutually incapable of learning each other's language to fluency, even though members of both species are capable of speaking many languages within their species fluently -- and view themselves as having mastered one or more of the somewhat-childish languages that the other species speak. When listening to the other speak in their own language, the other seems ignorant and barbaric. When attempting to speak the other's languages, people cannot attain enough fluency to express abstract concepts well, even though they think they can, so they interpret the other's inability to grasp their attempts to convey abstract concepts as evidence that the other species cannot understand abstract concepts. Since no one can speak both languages and close the gaps, they never overcome the belief that the other species is more barbaric and less human/sophisticate/intelligent. Similarly, they are just different enough from each other that each other's technology seems obviously poorly designed.
- Holworth. The nanobots have eaten the world and most of the rest of the solar system (other than the sun). They are specifically programmed never to destroy biomass and to destroy any other nanobots that do destroy biomass. They are also programmed never to kill a biological organism unless they are specifically instructed to do so by another biological being, and to destroy any nanobots that fail to act accordingly. They are also programmed to remain pretty much dormant when they are not part of a network that is somewhat controlled by a biological being's instructions, and to destroy any nanobots that operate independently of the influence of a biological agent's instructions (except in specific approved ways described by "Pretty much dormant"). "Pretty much dormant" means that they still must enforce the rules about destroying nanobots that violate instructions, but other than that they wait to be absorbed into a broader network. There are also a few special broader networks, most importantly the Registry and a few infrastructure networks involved in shipping energy that dormant nanobots participate in by default. They are allowed to perform many optimizations, inferences, and guesses in the process of generally going along with what a biological agent wants them to do, and can follow vague instruction to optimize for certain conditions, as long as they don't kill any biological organisms in the process. (Killing biological organism requires specific instructions; it cannot be done simply because it helps complete a broader goal that they were instructed to complete.) The nanobots are also required to report certain forms of data to the Registry, and destroy any nanobots that fail to comply with the reporting requirements of the Registry, as well as destroy any nanobots that report data to the Registry that the Registry determines indicates a defect warranting destruction. There are several other protocols that the nanobots are forced to obey and enforce, on pains of being destroyed. (Nanobots that fail to enforce an obligatory rule are also destroyed.) This world is full of NPCs who live in the Coves and subsist as best they can. The people of interest in this world are mostly cyborgs who have extended their own minds with biological computers made out of bacteria as a workaround that allows them to use the full extended power of their mind to control their nanobots. Some free-floating biological computers that control nanobots also exist, but a common tenant of the many cults that exist within Holworth is that these devices must be destroyed, along with anyone who works with them, so purely biological computers have trouble persisting. Pretty much nothing exists in Holworth beside people, cyborgs, biocomputers, and nanobots. And the existence of non-cyborg people is debatable since even before birth people's bodies get filled with nanobots that allow them to survive in a world where people can obtain limited amounts of nutrients from food, but pretty much only get energy by absorbing electricity from the nanobot environment, and don't breathe the air that doesn't exist instead relying on the nanobots in their blood to convert the CO2 in their blood streams back to oxygen and sugars using electricity.
- Fantasy world where magic is a rare inborn trait in which some people have very specific magical abilities (more like super powers than magic). People who have magic can learn more general abilities through practice, but it is all still filtered through their primary ability. Members of the ruling class are very likely to be magical and keep pretty much everyone else in poverty/slavery. (The ability to be magical gets passed along like a dominant gene... though I'm not going to give any explicit in world genetic explanation of magic.) The ruling class kills anyone they discover to have magical abilities in the peasant/slave classes (almost guaranteedly the result of having been fathered by a member of the ruling class); some of them manage to flee and live like outlaws and sometimes manage to join associations like the maroons and Seminole Indians, which are able to offer some protection and resistance. Since having a magical child as a peasant is pretty much only possible if the child's presumed father is not the child's actual father, the head of the household where magical children are born are usually willing to kill them, especially since they have a strong incentive to do so. The ruling class has pretty much limitless rights with respect to what they do to the lower classes and most members of that class abuse their power excessively. It occasionally receives token Tolstoy-opposition from inside. It's the worst parts about the caste system in India mixed with the worst of new world slavery mixed with the worst of feudal Japan, and it's maintained by magic. I haven't decided what sorts of neighboring countries exist. My story so far only deals with the rural desert backwaters (without the waters) of the country -- in a village that is just barely on a route between two major cities.
- Real-world with magical realism where some people's imaginations have the ability to project manifestations into actual life... mostly their subconscious imagination rather than their conscious imagination. This disproportionally results in the manifestation of things out of nightmares. A few people gradually learn to control this ability, some use it to fight against the monsters of their imagination, and some use it to seek to gain personal power. This ability is reasonably common in children, and most people lose it as they age, but the few people who truly control their ability are almost all adults. Most people don't believe in the paranormal and seek purely natural explanations for why strange bad things are happening and why these things mostly involve young children. This results in constant witch hunts.
- Another possible future. Someone creates something enough like AI that it allows him to extensively control the world, and he (and successors) turns the rest of the world into a bunch of sandboxes for experimenting on what happens when he exposes people to various conditions, and a playground for the things he wants to do. He has many children in many of these different worlds and elevates some of them to deity-like status. He also has himself cloned many times (doing some genetic experimentation in the process), and his line of succession passes down through his modified clones. The stories mainly concern the people living in his sandbox worlds -- where they experience contrived levels of technology. One society has all of the technology useful for building spacecraft, but live in an environment that was chosen to make the production of food entirely impossible, and can only survive through their service to "the gods" who literally deliver their food to them from on high. Some societies have no written language but have industrial-revolution era technology in most other respects. Others have computers and electricity but weaponry hasn't advanced past swords and bow and arrows. Some of these societies are permitted to live in as much peace as they can enforce internally, and other societies are subject to the whims of the gods that occasionally open up gates towards neighboring places... having preached through their temples a tradition which instructs them to go to war and pouring out their wrath on those who refuse to fight when this happens. The god-king of this particular world is neither sadistic nor malevolent, but he is also not benevolent. He just enjoys playing god.
Other ideas for fantasy worlds that I've toyed with quite a bit include the following. I might eventually merge several of these ideas into one, because I have too many worlds already, or I might add them into the world's I've already mentioned.
- I really like the idea of a magical system with time-adjusted trade-offs. So magicians, wizards, and casters. Magicians use wands and can learn some magic really quickly, but they also peak early. They basically have a set playbook of prepared spells. Wizardry is physically demanding enough that people peak in early adulthood like professional athletes do... but like pro athletes people really don't have any hope of becoming a powerful wizard unless they've trained their whole life. Casters don't use any implement to channel their power. It's just hand gestures. But people basically never peak.
- I've thought about having worlds with three genders one of which is very much unlike the other two, and written a little about a world like that, but I'm not sure there's anything more interesting in that kind of world than you can get simply by having sexual dimorphism with two genders. Two similar with one radically different is more interesting than three genders that are radically different from each other -- because it lets you keep the male-female dynamic similar to what it is in the normal world without changing things too much. I think this is the wrong kind of creativity for imaginary worlds.
- However, I am very fond of the idea of alternation of generations like in the typical life cycle of plants (the sporophyte generation is nothing like the gametophyte generation). In the same vein, metamorphosis in a sapient species could be quite interesting.
- I do like the idea of sexual dimorphism too as part of fiction. I especially like one idea that I've been playing with. In typical high fantasy, the elves are specialized for the forest, the dwarves for the caves. But the humans are generalists who can move between the niches. I like the idea of having one gender be adapted for the general case and being dimorphic with the other gender which is fragmented into a bunch of niches. The males of the seafaring communities have webbed feet and are optimized for swimming; the males of the mining societies are short and stocky; the males of the planes are tall and swift and have high endurance. None of them can really survive well in any environment other than the one which they have adapted for, and none of them really want to. Whereas, the females can travel around, while not necessarily as adapted for any particular niche.
- I also really like the idea of giving astrology more physical significance than it had in the ancient earth. Because the night skies are essentially a giant clock of annual patterns, they are naturally synced with other annual patterns, like migrations and weather patterns which made astrology useful for societies before calendars were invented. The moon's influence on the tides also affects ground water which has significant implications for planting. One way to amplify this effect is to give the world more moons, and another is to give it precession and nutations, possibly erratic. I think Europa has some erratic changes in its orientation, and the closer a body is to being spherical the more likely such changes are to occur. (I'd write about the radical climate changes that can only be read in the stars... the explanation would probably not be included in the actual story.)
That's a lot of topics...
But 40-80 books is a reasonable number to write in a lifetime. I think I will be able to tackle some of these at least, and turn them into interesting worlds with interesting series.
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